Dewey, my son, wants to go to a restaurant, one of those places with heads on the wall. Deer, moose, antelope, buffalo, dik-diks, etc. I wanted to take him to my usual place, Captain Nemo’s, one of those places people go to complain about terrible jobs and homicidal wives. I thought it might be an enlightening experience for him, in a take-your-son-to-work sort of way, to see where his father spends his time and who he spends it with. But no, he wanted to come to the place with the heads on the wall.
My son orders a salad and a root beer. I order steak, rare. I look at all the heads on the walls while Dewey pokes at his mug with his finger, melting shapes of hooded monsters, bogeymen probably, into the frost. There’s a dead deer head right above our table. Someone, some taxidermist, has put blood-red marbles instead of glass eyes into its empty sockets. And I thought I had derangements.
“There are tiny little bugs in the air,” I tell Dewey. It’s good for him to know about such things.
“Are there?” he asks.
“These little germs that get in your lungs when you breathe the air outside. Then they get into your bloodstream.”
“What happens then?” he asks. He’s really curious, but I give him a look that says if he doesn’t know already, it’s no use telling him.
His salad arrives. The croutons are moist. They look like little slugs.
“Do you remember acid rain?” he asks me, poking one of the slug-croutons with his fork until it bursts.
“Yes.”
“Well now they’re saying it’s not just in rain, but the atmosphere too. Which is why I have asthma, I think, and also why I get rashes on my skin.”
I want to ask who ‘they’ are and why they’re telling my son the things his father should be telling him. But I don’t ask – ‘they’ could be anyone, everyone. It’s a god-damned dangerous world out there.
The Jacobean Kempferter 